Survival of our species/Long-term thinking

Long-term thinking is hugely important because the short term easy choice often has a negative impact in a longer timeframe. Long-term thinking helps get perspective on the bigger picture and sometimes to avoid much larger problems further in the future it is necessary to change behaviour and make decisions in the present that might feel tough.

Thinking long term for our society is even more important than thinking long term individually because of the number of people that might be adversely affected in the future and not to mention the environment around us.

There seem to be many reasons that individually and collectively people have a short-termist attitude:

• We are naturally impatient and our immediate wants seem most significant. Longer-term issues can seem irrelevant.
• We all lead more individualistic lives than in the past which causes a certain amount of self-centredness, so often one's decisions are made to satisfy oneself
• We do not all feel totally sure that pessimistic scenerios far in the future will ever happen, or at least will even happen in our lifetime. Life feels too short to consider things too far ahead
• The business world tends to be very short-termist, often only thinking about profits in the next two to five years and how it can be achieved. Because in business that is what matters - if you fail in the short term, the business will not survive, and this mentality rubs off on the people too.
• Politics suffers similarly. If decisions are made by politicians for the long term but are felt to adversely affect people in the present than it may affect re-election prospects, and to most politicians staying in power is more important to them than implementing policies for the long term.

It is very hard to change the behaviour of large groups of people there is huge inertia to overcome.

So what is the big picture, what are we aiming for?

We need effective ways to help us all consider the longer time frame. It needs to be something that is explained to children in ways they can understand. We need illustrations of disastrous short-term thinking and the consequences.

What are the important long-term issues that we need to think about:

• Preventing the extinction of species, including our own
• The wider environment as a whole, such as altering the composition of the atmosphere
• Protecting ourselves from other potential global disasters
• Help steer modern society towards one that enables us to live happier more fulfilling lives
• Building trust and understanding between cultures